Some people just have it all worked out...

Tonight I am writing because otherwise I will open my mouth and tell this fellow sitting two seats away that he is an Olympic class yo-yo. I’d like to use a stronger word but let’s just leave it at that. His ‘views’ are almost certainly an amalgamation of Glenn Beck, Limbaugh and all the other gas bags of ultra-conservative radio and TV, which he has re-arranged a bit and called his own.

Let’s call him ‘our friend’. Our friend here is trying to impress some unfortunate woman by spouting a series of platitudes about why universal healthcare in a mistake, why he will suffer if it is passed, and why essentially the rest of the world are a bunch of lazy pigs because they don’t have comfortable incomes from their comfortable jobs at P&G (I happen to know he is employed there). He is proposing the same old tired argument that anyone on welfare or unemployment is a bum and deserves their fate, and that anyone who doesn’t have solid healthcare and everything else they need is merely someone who isn’t trying hard enough. People such as our friend with a college education and every advantage like to assuage their upper middle-class guilt by assuming that they had to work as hard as anyone else to get what they have. They don’t resent the advantages that their skin color, their gender and their privilege give them, but they resent the hell out of a single dime that “their taxes” pay into to charity or any sort of government program that is designed to help people less fortunate than themselves. Our friend pontificates that to create a socialized health care system would bring everyone down to “mediocrity”, and parroting out the usual sweeping platitudes that socialized health care is only one step away from Stalinism. He maintains that since he works for his health care (or so he believes), he has earned a higher level of medical attention. Hmm. This is nothing short of saying “I have more money, I deserve better.” Our friend supports his position by pointing out that Great Britain’s healthcare system, for example, has plenty of “issues” (his word). But he doesn’t in fact mention any of these issues…almost certainly because he doesn’t know anything about Great Britain’s healthcare system. He just heard that idea somewhere out there in easy-answer-land and since it supported his cookie-cutter opinion he absorbed it into his litany of unsubstantiated claims.

What I have to ask is ‘why’? Why is it that people who don’t seem to take exception to the trillions of dollars being spent on foreign wars will still carp endlessly about every dollar spent on people who are losing their jobs, or whose jobs won’t offer them healthcare? Just the slightest bit of research would reveal to our friend that nearly all the unemployed right now are not crack-dealing crime urchins or lazy slobs glued to daytime television and smoking doobies. Sure there are welfare freeloaders, but aren’t there also trust fund babies who never work a day in their lives because their way is paid for them? As far as character goes, what’s the difference between the two? Why does our friend think that it’s simply a choice for everyone to get everything they want? That fate and luck and starting position and so many other factors don’t determine our lives just as much as his Hemingway-esque determinist claptrap?

Why can’t our friend understand this? Because if he did the whole rationale for his comfortable life would unravel in an instant. Because like some of our other fellow citizens, he is thinking only of himself and not willing to give up even a sliver of his comfort so that so many more can at least stay warm, fed, and maintain a few scraps of dignity…and he hides that selfishness behind a veneer of well-informed moral outrage. But sadly, it’s just a set of blinders so he can continue to live the way he wants without worrying about the facts.